Sons of Anarchy

Hellboy and the mom from Married ... With Children team up.

I love it when a show comes together. It usually happens in the second season. The writers hack away what doesn’t work and polish what does. It happened that way with Chuck, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Parks and Recreation, The Office and The Simpsons.

And it happened with Season Two of Sons of Anarchy. Even in the first season, the show had potential. The setup was promising: The town of Charming, Calif., has long been controlled by the Sons of Anarchy, a gun-running motorcycle gang. But gang member Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnan) discovers that his dead father wanted to take the gang straight.

SOA’s patriarch, Clay Morrow (a gravelly Ron Perlman), however, believes to do so would be a betrayal.

In any Hells Angels-inspired work, you should be able to smell the leather and exhaust, feel the bugs in your teeth, the road rash scars on your back and the weight of the brain-stained tire iron in your hand. Sons of Anarchy has always nailed the grit.

Season One of Sons had the tone, but no direction. It puttered along when it needed to go full-throttle. It couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a grindhouse-style B-movie, full of over-the-top caricatures and goofy gore, or a brooding, pitch-black Shakespearean tragedy. The tonal shifts caused whiplash.

But Season Two, which begins with the gang rape of the SOA matriarch (Katey Sagal) by white supremacists, trades cheese for brutality. Sagal played the grief of a proud, strong woman with heartbreaking transparency. The stakes rose. The pace quickened. Sons became one of the best dramas on television.

It wasn’t perfect. The sassy and seductive ATF agent (Ally Walker) was a relic of Season One’s camp. Her acting, like she’s playing head investigator in Boondock Saints 3: Saints Go Marching In, stuck out painfully amid her grave surroundings.

But mostly, Sons excels at the who-do-you-root-for dilemma that cable’s antihero dramas (The Shield, Breaking Bad, The Wire) specialize in.

Where Breaking Bad and The Wire were tightly constructed downward narratives of corruption, Sons of Anarchy is messier. We don’t yet know the moral fate of our characters. Their souls are still careening down the open road, their destination unknown.

(Sons of Anarchy, FX, Tuesdays, 10 pm)

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